Lightning Struck
by Assimbya
Summary: Justine reflects, and endures. Based on the Marquis de Sade's Justine. [Warning for sexual violence.]


Lightning was the only thing that ever truly touched her.

Your boundaries move; that's how you survive. At first, your biggest compromise is the dirt. You're not in the convent anymore, and you don't have time to wash yourself daily, or fresh water with which to do it. You can smell the sweat beneath your arms, and feel the grime on your cheekbones. Your body sickens you. But nothing except the soot and sweat reaches beneath your clothes.

That doesn't last. Soon you're alone, outnumbered, and the only bargain you can make is to exchange one violation for another. Strip in front of them; squat, get on your hands and knees and let them fantasize. You content yourself with the knowledge that they are not doing the things they imagine.

After that, the descent accelerates. A rape, first, but at least you are blissfully unconscious during it, for all that you have the burning and the discomfort afterwards. Then more rapes, and those ones you have to remember. As if that isn't enough, they find new, deeper ways to get inside, whipping your back raw and opening up your veins. They don't even leave you your morals or dignity - you have to be compliant and complicit, aid in their pleasure and lead your fellow victims to the torture chamber. Each time reaching in deeper, pulling you closer, opening up your skin further.

There is, however, this - you never stop arguing.

"But the man you describe is a monster."

"The man I describe is in tune with nature."

"He is a savage beast."

She wasn't stupid; she knew she couldn't win the arguments, not while she was chained to the wall and they were the ones holding the whip. How could she prove the mercy of heaven with her throat raw from screaming? But it was better than begging to be spared, or breathlessly agreeing with their propositions. If she stopped arguing, she would have given up. She would have stopped trying to escape. She would have cared too little to cut the cord in time when Roland hung her. She would have become nothing, a body without a mind, without a soul.

You are in a picaresque and your map is dotted with minefields. The earth is full of places that the light does not hit, castles that block out the sun and there are too many for you to swerve around to avoid them. They've laid traps for you, Justine, and the iron teeth will shut around your ankles, leaving you on the forest floor with your skirts around your waist.

She has doubts still, of course she does. She thinks back and wonders how things could have gone differently - what if she had cooperated with Madame Dubois; what if she had never found out what Rodin did to his pupils; what if she had not tried to aid the Countess de Gernande. And she compares her attackers - Roland hurt like hell but at least he came quickly; the Count wasn't really so bad, if you could stomach the blood loss; Saint-Florent was unspeakably savage, but less physically repulsive than some of the others.

Most of all, she wonders how it would have been if she had stayed at the Convent of Saint-Mary-in-the-woods. It's ridiculous; that arrangement was perhaps the worst, to have to adjust oneself to the varied desires of the four monks, to wait with dread for tedious drudgery of one's turn on watch, to witness the horrid and continuous blasphemies. But she thinks of Omphale, who was pretty and kind and tried to make the best of all of it. She thinks of lying in the quiet dormitory with the other girls. She thinks of the way they would gossip together, with fear but also a light, easy resignation, about who would be servicing which of the monks, about how hard Clement's beatings had been lately or whether Severino had been in a rage.

There was a predictability to life in the convent, a routine. Later, standing before Saint-Florent and Julien, trembling with rage at their ugly perversion of justice, she wondered why she had been so set on leaving. If violation was all her life was going to consist of, then she might as well have stayed in a place where she could be clean and well-fed while enduring it, where she had companions with whom she could joke about the proceedings.

You have been through so much pain that you find yourself practically a connoisseur. You can tell apart an experienced flagellant from a novice, and can tell while enduring a whipping how much the blows are likely to hurt the following day. You have private words for the different kinds of pain, and you know some are easier to bear than others. When a new attacker reveals himself, you always have a moment of panic when you do not yet know what sort of things he will try. You can calm yourself after you've seen what a session with him looks like - even if it's unbearable, it is no longer an unknown quantity.

You know, too, what arousal is. Some men like to touch you, or watch others touching you. It confused you at first, but now you note the fact of it coolly, with horror and distaste but little shame. It is something your body does, like the pain. There are few things which your body does that you like, but this is no worse than pain.

Sometimes, you've been aroused when watching. You recall especially the wash of blood over the Countess de Gernande's white face, ashen as Christ's. The comparison occurred to you in the moment, with your mouth at her husband's groin, and it deeply disturbed you, as did the mounting of desire in your pelvis. You still do not know what it was desire for.

Justine never remembers her dreams, but, when she wakes, she feels worn out and exhausted.

To her, the world at once feels very large and very small. She has spent so much of her life traveling, wandering along dirt roads or through forests or across the rocky sides of mountains, but she has never had any sense of how far she has gone. Her path lacks any identifiable destination, and for all she knows her time may have been spent in an interminable circuit around Paris. Once trapped in the dark holes of the world, everything shrinks down, and she thinks that she has been here before, that perhaps the journeying was only a dream and her waking life has consisted only of an uninterrupted stream of violations.

She wonders where libertines come from, what they were like as children. Sometimes, she forgets about the existence of children entirely, and then a brief flash of an image of Juliette at eight or ten or four brings them to her mind. Someone must have borne all these boys who grew up to be ravishers, must have fed them and sung them lullabies and comforted them when they cried. All that must take place in a different world than this.

In the Convent-of-Saint-Mary-in-the-woods, pregnancy was a punishable offense. Omphale showed her how to fit herself with sponges to prevent conception, but she has never had need to worry. She thinks that, at some point in her life, her body must have become broken enough that it simply gave up on pregnancy. She cannot recall when her last menstrual period was.

You never asked to be someone's embodiment of virtue, either unfortunate or rewarded.

Juliette has changed, when Justine sees her again. Her skin is hard, and shining. She powders her cheeks and breasts and dresses in bright, insect colors. There is a curl of a smile at her lips that could be delight or disdain.

She leans in close. "Oh, my poor sister. Do tell me _everything._"

Juliette has killed her father and her daughter and several heads of state, but she cannot harm her sister. They complete one another; they would each be nothing without the knowledge of the other's existence. When Juliette looks at Justine, she feels like melting in uncharacteristic sympathy. When Justine looks at Juliette, she finds herself coolly calculating the little hints of stiffness in her movement and the old injuries that they betray. When Juliette asks her to tell her story, the words come to Justine's lips, ready-formed. The tale pours out of her smoothly, chronologically, with hardly a hesitation or moment of forgetfulness. It is as though her mind has, unbeknownst to her, been constructing the story in her body's wake, counting up its losses and transmuting them into narrative. She has been waiting all these years to give her account to Juliette, even though she did not know it.

Juliette does not reciprocate. Justine knows, somehow, that she fears reproach on its account, but she cannot help feeling that her sister will destroy herself in her silence. There are many reasons why confessors are necessary, and not all of them have to do with absolution.

(In these worries, Justine is wrong. Juliette is a woman of the world, and she will find an audience for her own picaresque.)

The lightning is sharp and clear and for a moment, the whole room is bright with it. It strikes her cleanly, unlike any knife or needle or fist, and it penetrates all the way through her, with a thrilling agony. It is a kind of pain that she has neither words nor context for.

Justine stands in the window and lets it strike. She does not fight. She does not argue. She has been told so many times, by so many libertines, that their cruelty is only the brutal working of nature, but they were wrong. _This _is what nature's brutality feels like.

Justine dies, conquered only by the storm.


End file.
